[This is an article I originally posted in January that I've edited for clarity.]
The message of this book is that the American Church has sinned because it has remained silent in the face of modern evils, exactly like the German Church sinned because it remained silent in the face of Nazism in the 1930’s. This state of things is directly caused (in Eric Metaxas’ telling of the story) by Luther’s too-simple concept of “justification by faith alone” and by his reaction against the Peasants’ War of 1524-1525 (based on what Metaxas says is Luther’s too-simple interpretation of Romans 13:1-7). The Church, first in Germany and now in America, has been lulled into sleep by Luther’s understanding of faith, Metaxas says, because that understanding holds faith to be only an intellectual assent to certain doctrines and not a complete selling out to love and serve God with one’s whole being. Metaxas further says the German Christians of the 1920’s and 30’s complacently accepted Nazism because Luther’s stance against the peasants’ rebellion and for the rulers of Germany allowed them to think it was OK to go along with whatever the government wanted to do, to avoid political involvement, and to remain silent in the face of evil. Dietrich Bonhoeffer tried to wake up the German Church by exposing this “cheap grace” (which allowed the German Christians to think saving faith does not demand political action) but the German Church failed to listen, and because it failed to listen, Hitler and Nazism triumphed. The American Church must now heed Bonhoeffer’s message to wake up and see that Christian faith demands political action: speaking out and working in the political arena against the moral evils that are now threatening to take down this nation, even if that means working in ways that are not thought to be acceptable by religious people, just like Bonhoeffer joined the plot to assassinate Hitler when the good German Lutherans did not think that to be acceptable.
And make no mistake, Metaxas in writing this book explicitly claims to be speaking for Christ, bearing a message that we must either accept or face Christ’s judgment for rejecting. In a talk he delivered to Second Baptist Church of Houston promoting his book, Metaxas says:
“Now when I say it is what I have to say, you better know it is what Jesus has to say and not what any of us have to say. And for me to have the temerity to write a book with the title Letter to the American Church, you have to understand how humbling and frightening it is if the Lord asks you to say something. Because when the Lord speaks, you know you need to get out of the way. You need to make sure that by His grace, He is the one speaking...”
(Remarks beginning at 2:16)
And:
“The church needs to hear this message. And when we say we believe, the Lord says ‘I’ll be the judge of whether you believe or not.’ You know, Luther kind of overdid this, right, because we had so much works stuff going on behind the medieval church that he thought he needed to stress it’s by faith, it’s by faith, it’s by faith. It is by faith, but just as Bonhoeffer writes about this thing called cheap grace, there’s also cheap faith, where you say ‘I believe, I believe’ but the Lord says ‘Yeah, you say you believe but I know you don’t. I know you don’t, and I will judge you based on whether you believe or don’t. So you might think you believe, you might say “Lord, Lord” but I’m telling you, from your behavior, you do not behave like someone who loves me, who trusts me.’”
(Remarks beginning at 24:39)
And finally:
“And we are in the very place that the German church was in 1933. And it is a waking nightmare that this is true and most of the church does not know this. If you are afraid to speak up against cultural Marxism, if you are afraid to speak up against Critical Race Theory, if you are afraid to speak up against transgender madness, if you are afraid to speak up against any of these issues, I just want to tell you, if you are afraid to speak up about any of those and OTHER issues, God is judging you and will judge you, because the lives of millions depend on you behaving as if you are free and you only fear God.”
“...[William Wilberforce] cared more about the Africans suffering the tortures of the damned than he did about what respectable people thought about him. He did the right thing because he feared God and loved God. If you do not live that way, folks, you stand condemned.”
(Remarks beginning at 32:49)
That’s the gist of this book. It is evident that this picture distorts Biblical and historical reality almost beyond recognition in order to get it to fit into Metaxas’ well-known support for Donald Trump and MAGA. (See his debate with David French at Should Christians Vote for Trump? Eric Metaxas vs. David French; note that the actual debate begins at 10:33.) Consider the following passages:
“And what if standing with the disenfranchised and the poor also means standing with those who are lower-class whites? Will we step aside from doing so because this is unfashionable in some circles, or because someone might cynically call us ‘white supremacists’?” (p. 13)
“We are obliged to speak up despite whether the wider culture applauds or denounces us. When patriotic Americans are unfairly demonized as ‘white supremacists,’ are we not obliged to stand up for them just as we are obliged to stand up for those victims of racism in our past?” (p. 99)
“All truth is God’s truth, and sometimes it is those who are not bound up and crippled by entangling and confused ‘religious’ views who can see most clearly. They have no strange theological ideas hindering them from speaking out about what they see.” (p. 104)
“So why do some keep silent at certain times or avoid certain subjects? Is it because they are afraid of making a mistake for which God will judge them? Many in the Church today have what Bonhoeffer might have called ‘theologically restrained objections’ to coming across as political, or even merely to voting for a candidate whose demeanor doesn’t tick all the boxes they think necessary. For them, it is not about doing what they think is the right thing for all concerned—whether in how they vote or in other things—but is more about their own theological purity. In other words, they are not thinking about others, but about themselves. But they are doing it for ‘religious’ or ‘pietistic’ reasons.” (pp. 118-119)
“So for example, if we vote for someone whom others may criticize as being guilty of this or that, the real question is, did we vote for that candidate because we genuinely believed they would enact policies to help people, despite what some might think? Or did we vote or not vote because we were mostly concerned about what others would think of us?” (p. 121)
“But David and Wilberforce and Bonhoeffer and Reagan and others—who are outraged by the evil that they see—are willing to risk everything to engage it, and to fight with all their might and main, whatever the outcome. They know that unless they try to vanquish it, evil will win.” (p. 135)
“Heaven looks to you and to me to do the right thing. What part of the tottering wall has God called you to push? Are you to run for office? To homeschool your children? To give millions to some vital cause for freedom and truth and justice? Are you to speak out in a situation where others are being silent? Are you to vote—and even advocate—for a candidate some are denouncing as ‘un-Christian’, but whom you nonetheless know to be a champion of God’s purposes?” (p. 138)
So the whole book is really nothing more than an attempt to shame or to scare conservative Christians who are thus far unconvinced of Trump’s worthiness to hold political office into dropping their scruples and supporting him politically. Trump and MAGA are the unnamed heroes of Metaxas’ book, Dietrich Bonhoeffer the named hero, and ordinary German Lutherans and Hitler the named villains. Luther is the hapless originator of the root errors of the German crisis—though he meant well at the time and accomplished some good in freeing the Church from Catholicism, he was over-enthusiastic and made some big blunders in his teaching about Christian faith and life that misled the German Church, rendering it unable to stop Hitler and Nazism. Now, because the very same errors infect the American Church, it too is in danger of the judgment of God for failing in the same way.
It’s all of course a ridiculous caricature of Luther and Lutheran teaching, the history of the Germany and the German church, and Bonhoeffer’s life and views; not to mention of the Bible’s teaching about justification, faith, and works, and about the relationship of Christ’s kingdom to the governments of the world. It would take another book twice as long just to untangle the misrepresentations, exaggerations, omissions, and outright falsehoods that it contains and set it all straight. In this review, however, I would like to focus only on one topic: Metaxas’s severe distortions of the Biblical teaching of justification (and of Luther’s own teaching of it). By teaching us that justification is not really by faith alone but must also, in some sense, include works, Metaxas makes Christ into a judge to be feared instead of a savior to be trusted. He is diverting his readers from a life of simple faith in Christ to a life of faith partially in Christ and partially in their own works (speaking out against unjust and ungodly laws) that are said to validate that faith. He is mixing the Law with the Gospel in claiming that God condemns Christians who don't act the way Metaxas thinks they should act.
His error is most clearly shown when he tells us what he thinks is the full, true, Biblical definition of the faith that justifies us in contrast to the “thin and one-dimensional” idea of “faith alone” that Luther was supposedly responsible for promulgating. Metaxas writes,
“We use words like faith and belief, and over time they come to mean something far less vital than they did in the beginning. So we have to revisit these ideas, and restore the Christian faith to its fullness in the minds of the Church.” (p. 68)
He then directs us to Matthew 22:34-40, which reads (in the KJV),
“But when the Pharisees had heard that he had put the Sadducees to silence, they were gathered together. Then one of them, which was a lawyer, asked him a question, tempting him, and saying, Master, which is the great commandment in the law?
“Jesus said unto him, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment.
“And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.”
Then Metaxas comments,
“Can we imagine how far that idea is from our own attenuated ideas of ‘faith’ and ‘belief?’ First of all, it is a commandment. It is not a suggestion. It is utterly required of us. There is nothing sideways about it and no suggestion that it is a suggestion. And the commandment is not that we merely believe in God, but that we love Him. Can there be any more astonishing contrast than that between merely ‘believing’ in God and in loving Him? And just in case we have a thin view of what love means, Jesus says that we are to do it with all of our heart and with all of our soul and with all of our mind. Is there any way that we can miss His meaning in that? God commands us to passionately and utterly and wholeheartedly love Him. He is not interested in what we say we ‘believe.’ He demands from us the wholehearted and passionate devotion of a lover.” (p. 69)
Yes, of course God demands that. Our problem is that we regularly fail to love God and our neighbor at all, much less “passionately and utterly and wholeheartedly”. Our love and our works of love are imperfect. We are in the position of the needy man who said to Jesus, “Lord, I believe, help thou my unbelief” (Mark 9:24). That’s a real illustration of faith—we trust in Jesus and cry to Him for help in spite of our own failure even to believe perfectly.
And the thing is, Matthew 22:34-40 is not about faith or belief. Neither the words nor the concept are there. The passage says “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart” and “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself” are commandments, and that these two commands are a summary of the law—the same law that the Bible says can’t justify us but instead condemns us because we fail to keep it perfectly. We frequently fail to love God and to love our neighbor, even after conversion, and that’s why we need justification apart from these and all other demands of God’s law—justification by faith alone. God, because of His grace, sees our faith in Jesus and credits that to us as our righteousness (Romans 4:5-8). We become righteous only when we are clothed in Christ’s righteousness; any attempt to become righteous before God by clothing ourselves in our own works gets us rejected by God (Romans 9:30-10:4).
And the righteousness that’s ours by faith is not merely for a one-time application at conversion, as Metaxas seems to think (he says on page 57, “Jesus died on the cross for our sins, and when we accept His sacrifice by simple faith, we are saved.”) Paul wrote to the Galatians, “O foolish Galatians, who hath bewitched you, that ye should not obey the truth, before whose eyes Jesus Christ hath been evidently set forth, crucified among you? This only would I learn of you, Received ye the Spirit by the works of the law, or by the hearing of faith? Are ye so foolish? having begun in the Spirit, are ye now made perfect by the flesh?” (Galatians 3:1-3 KJV) Having begun by the hearing of faith, so must we continue. If we’re relying on the flesh and its works of obedience to complete or validate our faith, we’ve been led astray.
Another problem is Metaxas’ claim that Luther’s peculiar “idea” of “justification by faith alone” means faith is only an intellectual assent to a doctrine. Every work of Luther’s shows otherwise. Luther consistently taught that faith is not mere intellectual assent. It is incredible to me that Metaxas has written a biography of Luther and can still claim that that’s what Luther taught, or even that his teaching opened the door for that. Luther always taught that intellectual assent by itself is not true faith. For example, when expounding on Galatians 3:11 in his 1535 Lectures on Galatians he says,
“A counterfeit faith is one that hears about God, Christ, and all the mysteries of the incarnation and redemption, one that also grasps what it hears and can speak beautifully about it; and yet only a mere opinion and a vain hearing remain, which leave nothing in the heart but a hollow sound about the Gospel, concerning which there is a great deal of chatter. In fact, this is no faith at all; for it neither renews nor changes the heart. It does not produce a new man, but it leaves him in his former opinion and way of life. This is a very pernicious faith, and it would be better not to have it. A moral philosopher is better than such a hypocrite with such a faith.” (Luther’s Works, vol. 26, p. 269, Concordia Publishing House, 1963)
As this passage also shows, Luther had no problem with teaching that true, saving faith results in good works, and that if good works are not present then true faith was never present. Many other passages from Luther’s works could be chosen to illustrate this point but you wouldn’t know it from reading Metaxas. For his case to be valid he needs us to believe that Luther’s teaching about “justification by faith alone” allows for mere intellectual assent to pass as faith. Metaxas further says,
“[James] makes it clear that the idea that we must only ‘believe’ or ‘have faith’ was self-refuting nonsense, and explains that it is actually what we do that matters, because our actions illustrate what we actually believe.” (p. 60)
Here we have the real difference between Metaxas’ version and the biblical gospel expounded by Luther. Metaxas’ emphasis is on the external righteousness that men see—he says that what we do is what really matters and illustrates what we actually believe. Luther’s emphasis is on the righteousness that God sees—he says that a heart changed and renewed by faith is what really matters; and that the good works produced by such a change are not perfect. But that’s OK—God knows that and counts our faith in Christ as our righteousness instead (Romans 4:5-8).
Finally, Metaxas makes much of the fact that Luther thought the book of James might not be canonical because it states “a person is justified by works and not by faith alone,” contradicting Luther’s translation of Romans 3:28, to which he added the word “alone” for emphasis after the words “we hold that one is justified by faith.” The fact is, however, that James 2:24 seems to contradict Romans 3:28 whether the word “alone” is added to Romans 3:28 or not. Some way of harmonizing the two passages has to be sought. Romans 3:28 says, “For we hold that one is justified by faith apart from works of the law,” while James 2:24 says, “You see that a person is justified by works and not by faith alone.” Luther’s way of harmonizing the two passages—discounting the book of James as canonical—is not a good way (and Luther in fact acknowledged that by including the book in his translation of the Bible anyway) but Metaxas’ way of, first of all, completely distorting what the rest of the New Testament says about the relationship of works to faith, and then, secondly, importing a notion of policital activism into the works that God demands of us, is quite a bit worse.